thebirdman wrote:decided to grow some spearmint and a chocolate mint herbs this year, and about to try in a batch this weekend...

Any thoughts on when to add ???

Boil?primary?secondary?

And how much..........

Well batch done, did not boil it....
Primary very active this round from cultured yeast strand.... Have had to tube both into a bucket of water...... Seams everytime I do a 2 day start on the yeast culture with the homemade plate....It goes nutzzzzzz...

So looks like its going into the secondary for a week... seeing I'm doing my summer special..."chocolat/coffee input from the grains" I'm going to place
the spearmint into it...4 leafs per gallon.
Have to start somewhere ??????

It's good you didn't boil it; that would most likely have driven off much of the aroma. I've never done anything with mint, but I did make a tincture with pumpkin spices that turned out very nice. Many herbalists make tinctures in order to extract the essential oils from herbs and spices, and I'd guess that this is what will provide the aroma. So I'd suggest one possible approach would be to make a tincture, experiment with a few shot glasses of uncarbonated beer and drops of tincture to decide what proportion you think will be best, and then add the proportionate amount directly to the keg or bottling bucket. You might have enough time to make a tincture if you leave the beer in secondary for a week or two. The one I made soaked about three weeks, as I recall. I used cheap vodka instead of pure ethanol, and I just dumped the spices into a few ounces in a mason jar and sealed it. Worked fine.

I also think that it might help you if you were to crush the mint leaves a bit before soaking them; in that regard, you might find it better to put them into a zip lock bag first, crush them inside the bag (in order to not waste any oils), add the vodka or alcohol directly to the bag for soaking, and then you can probably 'play with the stuff' now and then (massage the leaves to help extract oils). Just an idea. HOWEVER, I have no idea whether alcohol will also extract any flavor or aroma from the plastic zip lock bag (they are food grade so I wouldn't expect it, but I don't know for certain), so you might want to transfer to a mason jar for long term extraction and/or storage.

Thanks. I've been posting here off and on, but probably mostly in the BeerToolsPro Software forum. I guess it runs in spurts where I will do a lot of posting in one place for awhile, and then later find myself posting a lot in another place, without realizing how long its been since my last post in a particular forum. Too busy to post everywhere I want.